In keeping with the present air of accommodation and fellowship, I shall endeavor to treat spendi's most recent response to me as fairly, non-judgementally, and charitably as may be acheived given the circumstances and presents of that response. Here goes:
spendius wrote:timber wrote-
Quote:Worthwhile to note is that objection to/rejection of the science of evolution uniformly devolves to an essentially fundamentalist religious POV, and is expressed exclusively via populist, non-scientific/academic - largely vanity/self-published - out-of-the-mainstream, minority/contrarian literature, media, and websites, typically of religious affilliation.
That is not true and thus it being "worthwhile to note" is not true as well.
- I submit that you cannot demonstrate the statement as made to be false.
- I submit the available evidence, scientific, academic, judicial, legislative, and theologic, confirms the statement. I submit you cannot produce any independent, peer-reviewed, published, confirmed and/or externally cited work supportive of Creationism/ID-iocy.
- I submit that objection to/rejection of the science of evolution uniformly devolves to an essentially fundamentalist religious POV, and is expressed exclusively via populist, non-scientific/academic - largely vanity/self-published - out-of-the-mainstream, minority/contrarian literature, media, and websites, typically of religious affilliation, and challenge you to demonstrate that other be so.
- I submit that by your failure to meet that challenge, you and your proposition will stand self exposed as counter factual, without evidence, insupportable, mendacious, duplicitous, and otherwise fraudulent.
Quote:To begin with, the debate is not about anyone on here, which is where the debate is, objecting to or rejecting the science of evolution or anyone expressing such objections in the manner suggested.
Once again timber is erecting his own coconut-shy and positioning it so that he can't miss and then claiming credit for having done this fabulous feat.
Bullshit. The matter at debate in this discussion, by the discussion title, is "Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion", with the issue at debate being the mandated inclusion in the curriculae of publically funded institutions of education of Creationism/ID-iocy as other than a socio-philosophical construct.
Quote:The objection is to teaching evolution science in schools which must, by the very nature of that science and the real situation in schools and the communities within which they are embedded, be exclusive and disqualify any teaching which relies on non-material explanations for anything.
Bullshit. The notion that the Creationist/ID-iocy proposition offers
ANY legitimate, objective, scientifically valid, academically sound, intellectually honest " ... explanations for anything" is absurd on its very face. The only honest defence of Creationist/ID-iot proposition is that it provides to its proponents comfort consistent with and derived from the religiospiritual belief sets embraced by said proponents.
Quote:In essentialist theory a ball bearing has the property of roundness and so also does the steel from which it is made.
The ball bearing has this property of roundness essentially but the steel has it accidentally. The accident being human action. The steel could have a vast range of shapes depending on human choice but the ball bearing has only one shape otherwise it ceases to be a ball bearing whereas the steel remains steel whatever shape it is in.
Similarly, evolution theory has a quality of intellectual roundness which human action cannot disturb but only observe and play with. Otherwise the theory is falsified.
Non sequitur, irrelevant, meaningless sophistry, entirely empty of substantive, topical content, counter to fact; absurd.
Quote:What it does is satisfy a need for order and coherence and expresses a fear of disorder which is, fortunately, a characteristic of human behaviour.
It also expresses a fear of mystery and unfathomable complexity and provides a comfort station of simple certainties.
Bullshit. The Theory of Evolution satisfies the requirements entailed by objective, critical, intellectually honest observation and consideration of the available evidence, irrespective of the wants, needs, preferances, certainties, uncertainties, preconconceptions, prejudices, superstitions, or fears of any group or individual.
Quote:The error timber is constantly prone to is to compare unlike things.
Bullshit. Foundational to the position you forward is the fallacy that the Creationist/ID-iot proposition has claim to legitimacy independent of self-referential religiospiritual consideration, and further that by extension said proposition serve in some manner to improve or otherwise enhance the human condition.
Quote:By doing so he removes human considerations and actions stemming from them which one might presume he distrusts, and, it should be said, not without some justification. Whether such justifications are sufficient for his case is a matter of an opinion probably resulting from the pessimism/ optimism continuum.
He does not see a difference between knowledge and the use to which knowledge can be put by human choices which is a subject for the Politics thread.
In the last analysis he thinks knowledge itself is supreme over the social consequences of it. Under the exigencies of such a view human society and organisation becomes a rigidly determined object, like the ball bearing, from which freedom, individuality and choice are eliminated.
Bullshit. Your "Social Consequences" objection/argument is empty, specious, irrelevant, without evidence, purely opinion without supporting evidence, composed entirely of sophistry, deriving from, enabling, and promoting fear, ignorance, and superstition.
Quote:The evolution of traffic patterns, particularly in urban areas, shows a marked drift towards the elimination of the same things and with speculations about the driverless vehicle which has already appeared in the cropping of large fields and in many other activities.
timber is correct if he allows that the ultimate destination of his ideas is human automata as in Brave New World (using conditioning) and 1984 (using terror). This will not only be crime free but will also be imagination free (as city drivers are) and thus the end of science.
As a child of the evolution theory timber follows, slavishly, the spirit of the time which gives priority to the idea over human reality. In the composition of his high flown rhetoric he must float clear off the ground.
Like the vandal destroying the telephone kiosk, who takes advantage of the existence of other telephones for him to use in an emergency, timber takes advantage of the fact that we are not automata to argue that we should become so and were we to be in that condition he would have no mental facilities to have the ideas he has or, for that matter, any ideas at all.
Bullshit. Non sequitur, irrelevant, counterfactual, red herring, straw man, and again opinion without supporting evidence - an assertion comprising a falsehood; a lie. Nothing in the Theory of Evolution, nor the position relevant thereunto as presented either by legitimate, mainstream science, academia, and theologia or by myself so much as implies let alone entails any such thing, condition, or state of being as you allege; to the contrary, inherent to your presentments would be at once the denial of free will and the imposition on human freedom of thought and action a modality of purely religiospiritual construct.
Quote:Thinking of origins in a non-miraculous way is a product of the Enlightenment generally and Darwinism particularly. It was hardly possible before that and therefore such thinking constitutes a dramatic mutation which has nowhere near had enough time to prove itself a success and many voices are being heard even at the highest level which are suggesting it may well be a disaster. Should it turn out to be a disaster the mutation would have been dysfunctional, Galileo off his trolley and The Pope last man standing.
Bullshit. Argumentum ad populam, argumentum ad ignorantium, argumentum ad incredulum, specious, sophistic, duplicitous to the point of consciously mendacious misrepresentation of the facts at hand.
Quote:The scientific revolution produced a new ideology of progress in material living rather than any cultural progress. Munch, Goya, Picasso and Warhol are unthinkable before the Enlightenment.
The success, if such it is, of this ideology in improving material life is then taken to be a confirmation of its validity and the notion of "improving" is an entirely materialistic one and thus subjective.
Bullshit. Legitimate Science by definition and function is wholly objective, self-critical, self-correcting, self-directing, and foundationally open-ended, with the ongoing, accellerating improvement of the overall human condition attendant thereto, dependent thereon and wholly descendent therefrom being a circumstance, a thing, condition, or state of being, entirely independent of any ideology. Absent science, disease, famine, despair, disenfranchisement, and despotism, both secular and sectarian, would be far more component to the overall human condition than contemporarilly they are. Science is not ideology, it is the antidote to ideology, and only in the past half millenium or so has that antidote begun to counter the effects of ideology. The patient - humankind - while as yet not entirely well, is far, far less unwell than had been the case since having ventured from the forrest into the savannah, thanks due entirely to the burgeoning triumph of science over ignorance and ideology.
Quote:It is also taken for granted that further material progress in the future will continue to benefit the population and social health generally with no account taken of the fact that the very success of the scientific revolution has profoundly altered the environment from what it was 200 years ago just like guano has altered the islands which were most popular with the birds that produced it.
Propaganda by ideologues for materialism thus stresses the benefits of material progress and downplays, ignores even, the negative consequences and possible consequences of it and is cheer-leadered by institutions, such as media, which have most to gain from it. One thing seems certain though and it is that material progress, even at our levels, causes us some stress and renders us all difficult to live with and we mitigate these effects by recourse to drugs, penal sanctions and the law which results in the institutions which provide these joining with the media in promoting the materialist cause.
"Who gains?"- Miles Copeland. The Game of Nations.
The prime Lamarckian notion of changing the static Chain of Being into an upwardly directed escalator, his notion of inherited acquired characteristics being a minor matter in his thinking, needs to envisage a destination somewhere other than a farm in the wilds of my favourite state of the Union.
Bullshit. Your birdshit anology is birdbrained, as is your focus on "negative consequences", as so are your implied and explicit allegations that there be any such thing as a campaign to promote "materialism" to the gain or other benefit of any institution. I submit again, your "Social Consequences" proposition is foundationless, entirely without merit, specious, wholly irrelevant. Your proposition if full of **** and you forward that proposition in bullshit manner - circumstances mutually dependendent on one another.
Quote:The main principle of evolution theory is that it distinguishes, invidiously, the all embracing developments in species from the development of individuality and it is bound therefore to treat individuality as deviance.
Henry Ford said that customers could have any colour of car they wanted so long as it was black. Progress has given us a choice of colour now (big deal) whilst rendering us automata when driving and even out walking and it might be said that we only have an illusion of choice in the form of style and status signifiers (spiritual entities of course) and which readily evolve into contentless formuli and eventually into madness and into factory farmed humans like chickens.
PS. Huxley only resorted to the far-fetched bottle reproduction techniques to save the blushes of Home Counties matrons.
Bullshit. The main principle of evolution theory is that the nature of living things is observed to be consistent with the known laws, accepted theories, and well-tested principles of mathematics, cosmology, physics, chemistry, geology, and biology. Regardless what you or anyone else may think of it, the theory of evolution is not a matter of ideology, it is a matter of logical deduction based on broad, independendent, multi-disciplinary, consistently corroborative, wholly uncontradicted observation, correlation, and objective, empirical, critical, even skeptical, consideration of the best available data. The only ideology operative in the issue is that religiospritual ideology which perceives itself - rightly so - to be threatened by the entirely non-ideologic approach and effect of legitimate science. Opposition to/rejection of The Theory of Evolution, and advocacy for such, amount to nothing other than denial of curiosity, imagination, discovery, knowledge, and understanding; rejection of science overall with consequent opposition to the advance and improvement of the overall human condition. Perhaps the most damning indictment of the Creationist/ID-iot proposition is to be found in the very fact that said proposition illegitimately, dishonestly, mendaciously represents science to be ideology.
There - that's out of the way.
I do hope, spendi, that you and yours all are well, and may continue to be so. It is my sincere wish you take the entirety of the foregoing in the spirit intended, and perhaps profit thereby.
Of course, if wishes were fishes ...
